Web Scraping for Infants: Your First Steps with Python and Requests

Welcome to “Web Scraping for Infants,” a beginner-friendly course designed to introduce you to the world of web scraping using Python. This course is perfect for anyone new to web scraping and eager to learn the fundamental skills needed to extract data from websites effectively.

In this course, you will start with the basics of web scraping, understanding what it is and its practical applications. You’ll learn how to harness the power of the Python requests library to make HTTP requests, handle query parameters, and manage POST requests. We’ll also delve into error handling to ensure your scraping scripts are robust and reliable.

Moving on, you’ll explore HTML parsing with BeautifulSoup. We’ll cover the essentials of HTML structure, how to install and use BeautifulSoup, and how to find and extract elements using various selectors. By the end of this section, you’ll be adept at navigating and extracting meaningful data from web pages.

The course includes practical exercises where you’ll apply your skills to real-world scenarios. You’ll analyze and scrape data from a sample site, BooktoScrape.com, and then tackle a final project where you’ll build a price tracker for products on eBay. This hands-on project will consolidate your learning and demonstrate how to create a useful tool with your new skills.